Monthly Archives: December 2010

Not the most appropriate post title for the season. I got a lovely editing of the Apostolic Fathers (early church writings that overlap and just post-date the new testament) in greek yesterday. Reading through the Didache (an early work that seems to be written to prepare new converts for baptism, or at least provide a guide to conduct), I found this verse:

(Didache 8:1) Do not fast with the hypocrites. They fast on Monday and Thursday, so you fast on Wednesday and Friday*

— tr mine

I don’t have a good commentary on the Didache. I assume that those days were traditional fasting days. But for whom, for Jews, for other Christian groups, for pagans? Anyone got any information.

A bit of googling led me to an online commentary that claims it was a Jewish thing, but I’ve not come across this before, so I’d appreciate some back up. Anyone else ever heard of Monday and Thursday being traditional fasting days for Jews?

And, in addition to the geekiness of wanting to find out more about this. I confess I read the verse and had to laugh, then shouted out to my wife, who also found the specificity very amusing.

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* The days of the week are given numerically (second and fifth, fourth and the day of ‘preparation’ [i.e. before the sabbath].)

This is the third post in the series. The first is here, and the second here. I’m going to use some jargon I introduced in those posts, so I suggest you look there first.

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In the last two weeks I’ve read two books by Larry Hurtado. “How on Earth Did Jesus Become God” (Wm. B. Eerdmans 2005) and “Lord Jesus Christ” (also Wm. B. Eerdmans 2005). Both concerning the devotion to Jesus in the early church. I enjoyed them very much, and found sections quite transporting. But I found both books rather like walking into the end of an argument. Hurtado expends a lot of effort in both books arguing against a viewpoint I didn’t hold, and couldn’t see the merit in. In particular the “How on Earth Did Jesus Become God?” book didn’t appear to concisely answer its own question (it is a series of edited lectures and papers, rather than work composed from scratch). So this series is my attempt to synthesize and perhaps rephrase what might be his argument, if I’m understanding it. Any oddities here are therefore my responsibility, any nuggets of truth are probably his.

So here’s how I read it.

In the very early period after Jesus’s death, one or more of his disciples had significant religious experiences that led to a significant religious innovation: the worship of Jesus. This was cultic, not theological.

Jesus’s early followers were Jews, and therefore deeply embedded in a religious world that accepted a whole pantheon of spiritual beings (i.e. were etically polytheistic), but only allowed worship of one of them (i.e. monolatrous).

Worship of two figures (Jesus and God) therefore produced a theological tension with the emic view that there was only one god.

The development of Christology (i.e. the understanding of who or what Jesus was) was motivated by this tension.

That seems to me to be logical and sensible. Though, again, I confess I haven’t read the counter-arguments.

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While reading the books (this bit isn’t contained in them, not that I can find, anyway), I found myself thinking in terms of this contradiction:

I worship supernatural being A.

I worship supernatural being B.

Only one supernatural being is worthy of worship.

There are a few things that can resolve this:

i) stop worshipping A or B;

ii) emically decide that your worship of A or B isn’t ‘really’ worship;

iii) emically unify A and B, to claim they are the same being;

iv) abandon the last statement: your claim to be monolatrous.

Christianity initially seems to have done (iv) – the earliest descriptions of Jesus worship are based on the idea that Jesus is worthy of worship. And he is worthy explicitly because the capital-G God made him so. God raised Jesus to be the name above all names, so that at the name of Jesus, every knee shall bow (Phil 2:10 – Hurtado examines this hymn in some depth). This maintains an emic monotheism, but gives in to an explicit polylatry.

But that position seems to be relatively unstable – the temptation is to either see Jesus as not as worthy of worship (why worship the intermediate, when you can worship the real thing), or as too significant (how do you maintain your emic monotheism with Jesus around? – we see this temptation in John’s gospel with Jesus explicitly identified as divine in his own right). So it seems to have developed quite rapidly into (iii): what might be called binitarianism, the belief that Jesus is really the same being as the capital G, God. Christianity emically refuses to become polytheistic, and decides its polylatry is ‘really’ still monolatry.

But there are other ways it can resolve, and here I want to return to the example of Catholic saints. They receive cultic devotion that clearly shows that forms of Catholicism are polylatrous. But the resolution chosen is (ii), the catechism interprets this worship as not-really-worship (so a synonym such as ‘veneration’ is used, with a theological explanation of how veneration differs from worship). Emically it has a different status.

Certain forms of what we might call Gnosticism seem to have done (i) – they abandoned worship of the capital-G God, in favour of Jesus worship. Theologically treating the creator God, and his creation as wicked, and Jesus as the ultimate saviour from the trials of physicality.

I could also imagine resolving the tension by admitting a form of polytheism, by making the de-facto etic polytheism into an emic principal. Yes there are more than one God, and Jesus is the example. My knowledge of Jehovah’s Witnesses is not huge, but my understanding of their interpretation of John 1:1 is that they believe Jesus is a god. That may be an example.

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So Jesus became a God because a religious experience motivated a religious innovation: that his followers should worship him (anathema to the monolatry of Judaism at the time). This led to theological tensions, which were initially resolved by claiming that the one God had made Jesus worthy of worship, and finally resolved by the emic decision that Jesus is the same as the one God and therefore is intrinsically worthy of that worship.

This is part two in a three part series, part one is here. Please read that post, otherwise my jargon may be confusing!

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Following on from the last post, I’m still thinking about monotheism and polytheism, but the distinction I want to make today is between theology and cultus.

The last post dealt with theology: the doctrines or mythology of a religion. The ontology of its world-view or its cosmology. I said that, theologically, Christianity calls itself a monotheism, but could be seen (if looked at objectively, or etically) as polytheistic. Theology is the dimension that we’re most used to when we discuss religion. We talk about what different religions believe. Partly this is because we’re children of the western Christian tradition, where theology has been a central pillar of our culture since Augustine. We look at Christianity through the lens of theology, and so we bring the same lens to the study of other faiths.

In contrast we can think in terms of the cultus: the religious practice of a faith. In the mono/polytheism question we can distinguish between religious practice that is monolatrous, and (stretching the pattern somewhat) ‘polylatrous’. That is, religions that worship one god or more than one gods. Again remembering the emic/etic division from last time, we can see that Christianity, from the earliest records we have, is polylatrous. From the start it worshipped two gods (in our etic sense, of two supernatural agents): the capital-G god of the Jews, and Jesus. Later one could suggest it added the Holy Spirit, but in my experience worship of the Holy Spirit is highly limited.

I need to be a bit clearer, I think, with what I mean by worship. In the book that sparked these posts off (which I’ll talk about next time), Hurtado gives a list of things that constitute worship. Things such as addressing hymns to a being, praying to that being, giving sacrifice to it, and so on. But also the quality of rhetoric about and to that being (confessing the being’s greatness, for example); where cultus makes its closest approach to theology.

Using these criteria, we can say that (most) Christians don’t worship angels, but they do worship Jesus, and have from the earliest indications we have*.

So here is the promised connection from last time. Jews are monolatrous, but we can (etically) say they are polytheistic. Whereas Hindus are (both etically and emically) polytheistic and are ‘polylatrous’.

Christianity is the interesting one: it is polytheistic (etically) and ‘polylatrous’ (giving worship to both Jesus and God the Father), while emically insisting on being monotheistic. It is that tension that is at the heart of the question of Jesus’s divinity. And that, is part three.

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Can you place any other religions on this grid? What aspects am I missing here? I realise that no model is complete, and there will be some faiths (some forms of Buddhism, I guess) that just don’t fit. That’s fine. It should capture something of what it is meant to capture, that’s all. But, ultimately, is this switching between cultus and theology and between emic and etic models of theology just too confusing?

*Catholic Christianity does allow devotion and prayers to saints, however, believing them to be agents that can act on the propitiant’s behalf. I don’t want to tip my hand on the next part, but this produces a similar tension to the question of Jesus’s ontological status (a tension that is not lost on Protestant opponents of Rome). The resolution of that tension in catholic doctrine is quite different from the resolution of the Jesus question, however, as we’ll see.

In an attempt to split my tendency for overly long posts, I want to develop a thought in three parts. In the third part I’ll fully credit and migrate into a review of Larry Hurtado’s books, which sparked this train of thought.

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Is Christianity a polytheistic or monotheistic faith? How about Judaism or Islam? Or Hinduism?

That depends on what you mean by God. Here’s a way of thinking about it.

You can think emically. An emic description is one that lies within the meanings of the world it is describing. It is the way we normally describe religions. In this mode, Christianity, Islam and Judaism are all monotheistic – they assert that there is only one god (even giving ‘him’ a proper noun form, God). Hinduism is happy to claim there are many gods. Christianity, Judaism and Islam all have orthodox conceptions of a whole bunch of supernatural agents that are not God, however: angels, demons, saints, jinn, and so on.

Or you can think etically. An etic description is one that seeks to make objective judgements, that are not dependent on the self-understanding of the people we’re describing. In this mode we have to say what we will describe as a god. Perhaps god is an unhelpful term, because it is so strongly associated with its emic use in the Christianity that pervades our culture. But still, it is the term we have. If I define a god as a supernatural agent, then, it is clear that Hinduism, Judaism, Islam and Christianity are all polytheistic: their doctrine teaches a whole set of supernatural agents. They may emically only choose to give the label ‘god’ to one of them, but it is surely incontrovertible that they all have pantheons of spiritual beings*.

This is the first distinction I want to make. It is important to what I want to say next. The obvious objection, of course, is that Judaism (say) is very different to Hinduism, because in Judaism only one supernatural agent (the one named God) can be worshipped, whereas in Hinduism even lesser gods may receive devotion. Yes, absolutely. And that is the next distinction I want to make.

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For now though, what do you think? Is it useful to think of religion in these two terms? Are you used to thinking etically about religion, or do you find yourself drawn into each religion’s emic world? Are there any other emic claims that religions make that are etically suspect (independent of whether those claims are true)?

*It may additionally be objected that certain forms of Christianity (certain liberal Christianities, for example) and possibly other ‘monotheisms’ (though I’m not familiar enough with them) do reject any other supernatural agent other than God. They don’t believe in angels or demons, for example. That’s fine, they are not polytheistic in either sense then. I’ll come back to that later in the series too.

Okay you biblie-philes, here’s something a bit diffferent. This is a video with lyrics of Robin Mark’s worship song “Days of Elijah”. Unlike most of the “Jesus, we just really want to worship you*” kind of song lyrics, these are rather complex, and quite biblically far ranging.

What do you think? Any bits you recognize?

I confess I do like it. Well, apart from the “There’s no god like Jehovah” bit, it always irks me when people say “Jehovah“.

Late to this party, I know, but I finished reading Don Cupitt’s Sea of Faith, his argument for a non-realism in religion. I found it rather underwhelming, I have to say. The introduction was excellent, and the last chapter was also cogent, but most of it was actually a riff on the history of thought, rather than a impassioned argument for the validity of his position. It was almost as if his argument was “look we’ve been loosing our faith in a literal God for a while, let’s give in to the inevitable”. Which is fine and dandy, but rather intellectually dull, I thought.

Still, I think the fundamental thesis is right. God is a human construction.

I was irked when Don shows his hand as a postmodernist at the end. In a particular kind of pomo non-realism. He concludes that God is not objectively real, because nothing is. God is as real as anything, because everything is a construction of human conception and language. Of course this is complete bollocks. And rather undermines his argument. Why bother going on about God for a whole book then, when what you basically want to say is everything is imaginary? I’ve no time for that kind of pomo.

But that may be just a paragraph’s woolly thinking. My biggest problem with the book is that, if God were really a personally constructed myth, that each of us is free to construct or reconstruct according to our personal religious needs, why on earth would one want to construct a God-concept at all? The notion of a private God myth is hardly very useful.

Mythology is a group activity. God is useful to the extent that the mythology is shared, because it gives rise to patterns of behavior. And so it seems to me that the effect of taking on board Don’s ideas is to fall into the trap of de-mythologising the doctrines yet remaining loyal to Christianity (or some other particular religion of one’s context). Which in turn is to miss out on anything useful that the reforming can do for you (since you reformed what you destroyed back to its original shape). To understand that there isn’t an objective creator of the universe who will damn you for disobedience, and then to knowingly recite that very same being in myth form is surely somewhat perverse in its futility?

And that in turn means that The Sea of Faith basically reads as nothing more than a way of saying “you lost your faith? Never mind, its okay, keep doing what you were doing”. Fine and dandy, but rather dull.

Am I missing something really profound here… Or is it because I start from an atheist perspective I don’t have the existing emotional investment in these doctrines? The only reason I’d want to go anywhere near believing or acting as if I believed in a large chunk of Christian doctrine is if they were actually true. Voluntarily adopting them as myth seems simply insane to me.